Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

18.7. Summary

Obviously, deployment is an important action at the end of the development cycle of your new web site. However, it's unlikely that you only deploy your site once. As soon as you release the first version of your site, you'll think of other new and cool features you want to add, making the development of your site a never-ending story. To accommodate for this, you need to make your site easy to deploy.

One way to do this is by moving hardcoded configuration settings to web.config, giving you a single location to change parameters for the site in your development and production environments.

When you're ready to roll out your site, it's a good idea to create a copy of your site and clean that up before you send the files to your target server. Copying and then publishing a site is a breeze with the Copy Web Site and Publish Web Site commands.

Since you will deploy your site against IIS, you need to understand some important settings of this web server. In this chapter you saw how to configure the default web site and make some configuration changes. Because of the way security works in Windows and IIS, you also need to configure your hard drive so that the accounts used by the web server can read the files in your site, and write to specific folders like App_Data and GigPics.

The chapter closed with a short discussion of the Database Publishing Wizard, a tool that allows you to create a scripted copy of your database that you can use to restore your database on a remote ...